Name that tune...the rise of Shazam

Shazam is a veteran of the mobile app industry. The company's business started life seven years ago as a simple pay-as-you-go proposition enabling mobile users to identify song names with their phones, a service hyped by Shazam PR girls going around pubs on Friday nights - pub quizzes are an obvious application.

The service is powered by a sophisticated music recognition algorithm, able even to split hairs between different recordings of the same song, which refers to a four-million-strong song database that must be constantly updated.

The technology is so accurate it's used for broadcast monitoring to attribute royalties to artists for airplay. Company CEO Andrew Fisher explains: "We cut up a song into slices and look at the vocal performance and the instruments, and it's a sound wave… At any point in the song you've got peaks and troughs… It's a unique fingerprint."

Keeping up with kids' music taste, however, requires more than just great technology. Pre-release content is Shazam's "key differentiator", says Fisher - and getting those sounds into the database means having good relations with record labels and DJs.

Shazam's basic service is simple: the user dials a four-digit number on their mobile, waits a few seconds as the software listens and analyses the song - and then gets a text back with the track/artist/recording details.

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But in the years since its humble viral beginnings, the concept has evolved. Shazam now describes itself as a "mobile-to-web" company - and sports the requisite Facebook plug-in, seeking to expand its user-base through social networking.

It also encourages users to register on its own homepage and create Shazam profiles, building a community around the concept of music discovery and recommendation, in the style of Last.fm.

There's a chart of most identified songs on the homepage - and Shazam freely delivers track ID-ing (aka tagging) data to record labels so they can spot potential hits. Helping the record labels in this way doesn't just bring kudos - it oils the wheels of business-critical relationships.

The company's revenue is no longer restricted to ID-ing songs either, which typically costs 50p per successful ID for pay-as-you-go users, along with the cost of a standard network call.

Shazam now also works with music retailers such as Amazon and iTunes, along with business-to-business players like AEI Mobile, Arvato and Musiwave, to encourage and monetise users clicking-to-buy the music they have tagged - exploiting what Fisher calls "the point of inspiration".

"That's the great thing about the Shazam application - it is one of those pieces of technology that really exploits what the mobile device has to offer," he explains. "It's about immediacy."

The company has its own music store too, and a subscription version of its service - which makes up about 20 per cent of its business - where users pay £2 per month to get up to 300 IDs. So a business that started with the customer making a simple phone call has grown tentacles snaking off from mobile to web and back again.

But then, as Fisher notes: "People aren't doing everything over the mobile device, they are going across devices for different reasons and so that's why it's important that we support them."

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